Ginsberg was a known non-violent political protestor. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974 for The Fall of America. Ginsberg was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979 when he also won the National Arts Club gold medal. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 in 1995. Allen Ginsberg passed away on April 5, 1997 at 70 years old from liver cancer via complications of hepatitis.
